“Game development is no walk in the park, Mr. Hunt. For that would be too difficult to you, and the whole point of this conversation it to prove you’re meant for impossible things.” Good old Sir Anthony Hopkins. You just can’t argue with his eloquence (translated into the gaming realm thanks to the miracle of blogging ad lib) when it comes to matters of social importance. It’s been stated for years now, but the story bears retelling: Making games involves lots of testing, correcting, teamwork, banging your head and then more testing before a game even proceeds to beta stage. Of course, not all successful games involve such an accumulation of resources of the green cotton variety (read: money).
Counterstrike and Braid are prime examples, but the amount of frustration, discipline and adulterated caffeine involved in making them is no less. Demands are high in game development. But could when do the demands go from sarcastic exploitation to just plain exploitation?
Very much, apparently. Paul Farley is Managing Director of Tag Games, a company that develops games for mobile phones. He recently spoke to GamesIndustry.biz on the matter, stating how his company believed less in crunch development times for employees and more in what a lot of people take for granted: Living a normal life to spend by themselves or with their families.
“Well the appeal for us is that we’re getting experienced staff, probably coming up to their late twenties or early thirties, they have a family or want to settle down.” The emphasis for Tag and Farley, then, seems to be not on the amount of hours but the quality of them. “They’re looking for a job where either they can make games that are small and fun, enjoy day-to-day, work solid hours — work hard during the day, but go home at the end of it and have a life.
“That’s always been very important for us at Tag — we don’t do overtime, we don’t do crunch. We’ve been going for two years and we’ve never had crunch. We never intend to, and we’re very strong that crunch equals bad management, bad project management, bad timekeeping, or exploitation of staff. And that’s not what we’re about.”
Just like any major other major enterprise (except the BPO industry, those smarmy wankers), if a project is not going according to plan, then the plan could be altered, delayed or in the most extreme of cases, cancelled. Warcraft Adventures, any one?
“So we want to create the sort of environment where people are positive about what they’re doing, and enjoy it,” he says. “We’re picking up people at a certain stage at their careers, and for what you’d get in London they’ve got a five-bedroom house, a sports car in the drive, and still have money left over.”
It may seem strange for some people to think that a career in the gaming industry could be so corporatised or that a lucrative living is possible off of it, judging from the above statements. It is, and will remain so in the years to come. However, in the process, it’s important to remember that its employees are one of the hardest working sections of the entertainment industry (and no, India producing the most number of films, most of them mediocre, worldwide does not count) and deserve as much respect as the next suit-wearing bank CEO or Mercedes driving doctor.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
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